


The Unbroken Wheel

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: 16th Century CE RPF, Young Lady With Unicorn - Raphael
Genre: Gen, Unicorns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27643904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: "The Farnese, her mother tells her, are a sort of chimera themselves: made of the same motley of fine features that give such beasts their grace."
Comments: 22
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Unbroken Wheel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Toft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/gifts).



> I was very taken with your prompts calling for symbolic weirdness, Early Modern history, matrilineal unicorn-having bloodlines, and soulbonded maidens in their fourteenth year. This piece takes a lot of inspiration from Linda Wolk-Simon's essay "Laura in Loggia" which tries to make the case that the woman in the painting is the thirteen-year-old Laura Orsini (the probable daughter of Pope Alexander VI and half-sister to Lucrezia Borgia) and that it was meant as a wedding portrait for her union with Nicolò Della Rovere. It also plays around with a lot of ideas regarding Petrarchan beloveds and the powers of fascination (i.e. a woman's glances having infectious power).

“I look as though it annoys me.” She smiles. “He did a fine job making my poor face seem sonnet-worthy, but he might have spared the feelings of the poor little beast in my lap.”

The new made Laura della Rovere does not laugh at her own remark. She looks instead at the glass and tries to capture the same expression as the painting that hangs in the long hall. The servant who plaits her hair smiles, telling her that she does both her face and her husband’s passing attempts at poetry both a disservice. 

Laura disregards her.

She purses her lips. She casts her eyes sideways. She imagines that the ornamented room in which she sits is that great expanse of blue that Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino set as the backdrop to the woman he imagined her to be. As the braids of her hair are coiled together and fitted with pearls, she wonders if painters are all in love with the same woman that poets are. In verse or on canvas, it is the same: long-necked and high-browed, cheeks like roses and teeth like pearls, bodies dissected into so many flowers and gemstones. 

Laura thinks she can see a passing resemblance so long as she sucks in her cheeks and holds her chin down.

“She looked as though she was trying to get away, don’t you think?” she says after a moment.

The domestic actually laughs this time.

“ _She?_ I did not think there were she-unicorns, signora. Don’t all of them have bristling he-goat beards and make merry chasing after maidens?”

Laura cocks her head. A braid nearly falls out of place. Something in the word “maiden” sticks in the air, for all she has little resented being a wife thus far.

“If you’ll look at the painting,” she says firmly, “she seems in a poor predicament to chase anything. Besides, if the unicorn had no mate, wouldn’t we know. Wouldn't Pliny or the _Physiologus_ or whomever it is who writes of unicorns have said something?”

She closes her eyes then, not expecting an answer. When one comes, she does not hear it. 

She is imagining what it would have been like to actually sit for a painter—some warm, dumb animal in her hands. When she hears the fast step of somebody in the hall, she decides that if she can walk back to that past it would be as though she were unmarried again. If she can imagine that weight in her lap, her girlhood would not be at an end. She would be thirteen again and not fourteen, and her hair would lie soft upon her shoulders unbound by any hand or ornament 

When Nicolò finally finds her, she turns to him with a sudden coldness that makes him hesitate to address her. She giggles to see him taken aback, and she thinks that maybe she is like a painting or a poem in that instant—that maybe like Petrarch’s Laura, she can shoot darts and daggers from her eyes.

**~o0o~**

Nicolò does not touch her. How can he? The castle has belonged to her for her entire life and to him for a handful of months. How could he have mastery over either of them? The bright painted roof of the chapel seems to mock him as he looks at it, its tiles crawling with bears and unicorns: Orsini and Farnese heraldry entangled in some unending bacchanal.

The unicorn: he feels it palpably wherever he wanders here. Her mother’s symbol makes its appearance known across every bannister and tile. Even her marriage portrait in the hall has another bearded beast staring back at him, her white hands ringless as she turns her glance aside.

He tells himself he should ask after his conjugal rights sooner rather than later, but at each opportunity he finds cause to delay. The flash in her eyes seems as though it would annihilate him if he overstepped, and he sleeps alone in fear of them, dreaming of them both on the canvas and in the flesh. He wonders at times if there is a spiritual sort of incest to their union: a pope’s nephew and a pope’s daughter.

He considers the irony of it: Giulia Farnese and her child and unicorns. What could be less chaste than a child begotten of such a sire? At one point, he catches her reading in the garden, and he considers the summer sun on her ringlets. It is not perhaps of that same vaunted quality as the ill-famed Lucrezia’s, but is it not drawn from the same source. Perhaps God’s pontiffs carry the brightness of heaven in their blood, waiting for some courtesan to transmute it into her children’s hair. For all his mystifying wife does not bear a Borgia’s beauty, Laura retains an ethereality he cannot reckon as descending from her mother’s line alone.

Nicolò wonders if there is—perhaps—something more than chaste about children thus begotten, that perhaps to bed a pope appropriates chastity to the unchaste. It is a strange sort of daydream, but when he sees her alone and thinking herself unobserved, he imagines that she is some lady stepped out of a tapestry or fresco and that if she lies still enough, some creature out of  _ Indika _ will wind its way out of the castle’s shadows so that she might tame it.

She speaks to him little, but on that first afternoon she bids him walk with her, he thinks he sees a ball of light or cloudstuff fall from her lap as she stands. Nicolò considers men falling to lunacy and how they think of themselves before they are mad. As his wife reaches to take his hand, he imagines that he is like unto a tamed beast himself, and closes his eyes in the ecstasy of an animal pierced by a huntsman’s arrow.

**~o0o~**

The difference between fourteen and fifteen is not so far removed from the transformation of the year before, and Laura Della Rovere, mistress of Vasanello, learns the full weight and meaning of her birthright. She looks sometimes at the picture in the long hallway and thinks it more portent than portrait. She smiles now that she can see herself within it, even if the image is forever unsmiling.

Laura reads widely now, and she spends goodly amounts of Orsini gold on a Greek tutor. Her conclusions are always the same: ancient men knew nothing, just as men today. She was not waiting when she caught it; she did not let it come and lay its head in her lap—and surely whatever metric it is through which one measures virgins and innocents was not made for her and her bloodline.

It is during an over hot summer that she writes to her mother, asking veiled questions that she knows will return to her in veiled answers. She supposes that is the way of women in Rome: to let their intentions be known in a glance or a kiss but never in the evidentiary confines of papers. 

She supposes it is wise.

She receives an answer about the particulars of the portrait, and laughs to be told that the animal hanging off of her arm was once a little terrier: a loyal animal meant to presage a loyal wife. There was some artistic caprice on the part of poor Raffaello that made him alter course, and what Farnese would not be happy with another unicorn to ornament their apartments?

The Farnese, her mother tells her, are a sort of chimera themselves: made of the same motley of fine features that give such beasts their grace. Laura thinks of all those blazons that make up a winsome girls: of lilies and agates and gold-beaten wire. Is that not like the white animals that grace Castello Orsini’s tapestries and banners? Lion, gazelle, goat, and stallion: bound up to make one simple object of longing.

She likes to hear that it was once a dog, and so it is a dog she decides will be her companion. If the women of the castle whisper that they never saw a dog go thus, walking in brisk steps over the surface of fountains and eating hot coals from her unburnt hands, they will not speak of it. Men would never believe them.

Even Nicolò, who seems to age a year each time he catches sight of his wife’s little pet, will never confess that it is anything more than a passing fancy: a mirage brought on by sunlight or else by wine.

**~o0o~**

Giulia’s girlhood is long past when her daughter writes to her, and it is still a recent smart that Rodrigo pays no more mind to her charms. To run her fingers over Laura’s words seems to fill her blood with new fires, and she is merry and full of sanguine humour for the week that follows. 

She remembers herself, when she had a maiden’s bloom on her cheeks. She remembers that she was not a maiden when it came for her. It was not until that summer that they started calling poor Orsino Orsini the  _ monoculus _ : when they whispered that his wife’s crimes had blasted his sight.

Men would say such things of course. There is only one sort of mystery they seek from women, and they are never willing to imagine that wives and mothers have any great secret other than that they should be false. 

She was—she supposes—false as well.

All that long Carbognano summer night, she lets the recollections of past days heat her brain, and thinks of how grateful she is to whatever force rules the world that she should be born to such a birthright. Her bloodline was meant for the Rome of the pagan age, she thinks, and she has been blessed that Roderigo was a pope meant for such a Rome as well.

Somewhere else, across so many miles of wild countryside, the asters grow thick over her husband’s grave. Orsino died before his thirtieth year, eyesight failing him until he merely passed from one dark to another. He cannot speak to that moment when he saw Giulia laughing alongside a fountain—when his sight was burnt to nothingness by the brightness of the creature dancing around her feet.

Giulia remembers that that was one of the few nights she had lain in her husband's arms, whispering to him the long night that her family's blood was like a gorgon’s and that strange and beautiful things would emerge from it.

**~o0o~**

Laura is many things when she goes to Rome in autumn of her twentieth year. She is a woman of much means and of little ill fame. She is a beauty now, and many a swain has lamented her to be more faithful than a witless husband deserves. As she catches her reflection in the window of the new-exhibited chapel, she realizes she is very much the same vision as the girl that haunts the halls of Vasanello castle. She smiles, but it is the sort of smile a man would not notice if he hadn’t eyes for it. Few men notice either the terrier that is always in her arms, still and watchful as though it were a beast carved of wood or marble. 

When at last, after seven long years, she and her painter meet, Raffaello does not speak. Instead, he stands before the Sant'Egidio cedars and looks at her like a child frightened in the midst of a storm. Their eyes meet, and she understands the cord that runs between them: how all the atoms of light align from one gaze to another.

“I must thank you for the likeness you made of me, signor,” she says with barely another word of greeting. “At the time I thought myself not worthy of it, but I have long wondered how you managed to capture so much of a creature who never sat for you.”

The dog leaps from her arms, and the artist stands in dumb confusion, as though he were a fox upon which a whole band of hounds was setting. When he holds a hand out to it at last, she can see the glimmer of tears in his eyes.

“I must ask, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, if you would deign to paint me again.”

He seems desperate for a moment to agree to do so. He steps close to her—too close—and she can suddenly feel a tension with which the animal at his heels bends its horn towards his hot, yearning heart. She can feel for a moment the impression of all the  _ bella donnas  _ who have had his hands upon them, of all the Laura’s he has known out of the confines of verse.

He does not touch her.

“I think, signora—” he whispers, face growing ashen. “I think that would be unwise.”

“Oh?”

Something in his breast pains him, and he presses a hand to his heart.

“I think that it was better such paintings do not exist.”

She tells him that one does, and he acknowledges it. Before they part, however, he begs her that the work be destroyed if her familiar would ever allow it: destroyed or else covered over.


End file.
